The Only Dream I've Ever Written Down

I often have ridiculously wacky, intense, complex dreams, but rarely remember much of what happened once I wake up. Here is a glaring exception:


Dream I Had the Morning of November 20, 2004


I was trying to sell some scripts/ideas with my friend Kenny to a guy who ran a production company in a huge, opulent, modern skyscraper with a hotel, casino, offices, and condos. I had all the paperwork in a bag on the end of a fishing pole or something, that’s how I was carrying it, for some reason. Security was tight and I couldn’t get down the hall to the man’s office from the grand staircase. I was hanging out on the landing, waiting to see if Kenny could sweet-talk the doorman into letting us in. We were determined to see this guy.

The lobby was huge and old-fashioned--dark wood everywhere, kind of like the lobby to a swank hotel. Some guy came up to me and asked what I was doing there, what was in the bag. I told him it was full of great ideas and scripts for movies and that we were trying to meet with the guy at this production company to see if he would buy them. The guy was really pessimistic about our chances and said that we would never get in to see him and even if we did he would just steal our ideas and not give us any money. Office-type people kept breezing past us on their way up or down the stairs. I kept looking down to make sure my bag was still there, on the end of the fishing pole-thing. I kept looking over to see how Kenny was doing. And looking at this guy next to me who seemed to be waiting to see how it all turned out. Then I looked down at my side and the bag was gone. All our ideas! I got pissed. I ran down the stairs and told Karl the bag was stolen. The guy who had been hanging out with me, watching, came with me. “I just had it on the end of this fishing pole and then I looked down and it was gone!”

The doorman follows us as we walk slowly up the staircase and then run past the security guards just in time to see Skeletor pop out of a room, look at us, and immediately run away, turning the corner, leaving a trail of evil laughter. We chase after him. As soon as we turn the corner, we see this petite woman dressed kind of like Peter Pan. She is Skeletor’s second-in-command.

She doesn’t actually ever attack us, I don’t think. But she seems to be in charge of making sure all the evil things keep after us (flying things, snakes, etc.). She runs into a door and we follow-- the doorman and security guards are now not really chasing us, but on our side against what they immediately identify as pure evil.

When we enter the doorway, it leads immediately to a rickety, old, narrow staircase in a house in the rundown suburbs somewhere. There is a window and it is open. The petite Peter-Pan-girl floats outside the window, above the driveway, watching. I am now alone. I come down the stairs and everything starts to shake, things are falling over, kind of like an earthquake. There is a chest of drawers with a display case/glass-doored-cabinet thing on top of it, on the next landing below me. Things start falling out of it and crashing to the floor. I’m dodging huge stuff that suddenly starts flying at me. I grab a brick and heave it right at the Peter Pan girl, knocking her to the ground. I race through the doorway on the lower level and into a narrow hallway.

The hallway leads to a huge open area on one side of a large, modern office building that has a wall of windows looking out over the city, kind of like an observation deck, but not; there’s probably one on every floor, just an open area with desks, tables, chairs, lamps, kind of a lounge. The other five people (Kenny, the watcher, the doorman, and 2 security guards) are suddenly with me again and we run into this area. All kinds of huge flying insects start coming at us. Thousands of them. Some are big, some are smaller, they’re sort of not easy to see, almost transparent, and you can really only see the flutter of their wings.

I pull out a Nerf Dart Gun and start shooting them out of the air. The Peter Pan girl watches and laughs, in charge of all these bugs. Everyone else starts shooting Nerf Dart Guns and throwing anything they can find, and just trying to kill them all, and we seem to be doing a good job, despite the fact that we can barely see them and there are thousands of them. I keep shooting the darts at them and the dart carries all the way to the window and smashes them against it. I am amazed at how accurate we are. But some of them miss. I only have three or four of them, so I have to repeatedly run over and pick up or peel off the window all the darts and reuse them. I keep doing all these unnecessary somersaults and barrel rolls and looking over at everybody else, in the shit, swarmed by them, but killing them slowly and steadily. We finally kill them all. Peter Pan still floats outside, chuckling deviously, unfazed.

I go to pick up a dart by an overturned desk and see a bunch of the bugs in some kind of cocoon/larvae stage, clinging to the underside of the desk. “Oh, shit, guys. Check it out. We have to kill all these before they mature.” I lean in to get a good shot at one of them and hear a hiss and see movement. An enormous black Cobra snake is coiled up menacingly in the shadows. “Fuck! Look out for snakes!” We start killing the larvae but some of them shed their cocoons and fly out at us.

I decide everyone here is fine, they’ll kill them all eventually...maybe I should keep up the pursuit of Skeletor. So I run out this door at the other end of the U-shaped hallway/lounge area and suddenly find myself in the same old rickety staircase, staring out the same window, at Peter Pan, the earthquake happens again and I throw a brick at Peter Pan and run into the hallway and find myself in the same lounge, with everybody still fighting off these bugs. I keep doing this, in a loop, over and over, and every time I keep asking if anyone’s killed the snake yet, if anyone’s seen the snake. And nobody answers me and I keep expecting everyone to be killed by this scary big snake the next time I run through.

One of the times through the staircase, I hear Peter Pan say something like “one of these times you’ll make a mistake, you won’t be so lucky.” And then I hit her in the face with a brick, but I’m scared. Wondering if my accuracy will fail me next time. Then I run into the hallway/lounge and see the snake slithering off the way I have been running my laps, towards the other door. I run up behind it--I’m running super fast, by the way, barely even touching the ground, breaking all laws of physics and my shoes have wings on them now, like Hermes/Mercury. I catch up to this rapidly escaping snake and stab a letter opener through its neck and keep flying by. It hisses and flails around, pinned to the ground, and I get the feeling that it isn’t going to die for some reason, from this should-be-fatal wound. I run through the door again and this time I’m outside, in scrubby grass along an empty rural highway. I’m flying right above the ground, all I see is this patch of grass, as if I’m in a speeding car and just looking out the window at the grass on the side of the road as it whizzes past. I don’t see any farms or buildings or sky or anything. And I see a huge rat running along in the grass. And I hear Peter Pan say, “He doesn’t even realize that he’s the rat now.” The rat is Skeletor, I say to myself. And I’m right along with it, moving at the same speed, flying above it, and I don’t know what to do. Should I swoop down and catch it in my hands? What do I do next? What will happen? And then I woke up.